Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.
Parallel translations
- KJV Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.
- BSB Who can bring out clean from unclean? No one!
- NKJV Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one!
- NASB “Who can make the clean out of the unclean? No one!
- NLT Who can bring purity out of an impure person? No one!
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quick answer
Job acknowledges no one can produce purity from impurity. Human beings are born unclean and cannot cleanse themselves.
Overview
Job's rhetorical question, 'Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one,' confesses humanity's inborn corruption. No person can make himself clean before a holy God. This points directly to the gospel's answer: only God, through the cleansing work of Christ, can make sinners pure, doing what no human effort can achieve.
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 10
- John 3:6That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
- Job 15:14What is man, that he should be clean? What is he who is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?
- Eph 2:3among whom we also all once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
- Rom 8:8–9Those who are in the flesh can’t please God.
- Ps 51:5Behold, I was born in iniquity. In sin my mother conceived me.
- Job 25:4–6How then can man be just with God? Or how can he who is born of a woman be clean?
- Luke 1:35The angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore also the holy one who is born from you will be called the Son of God.
- Rom 5:12Therefore as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin; and so death passed to all men, because all sinned.
- Ps 90:5You sweep them away as they sleep. In the morning they sprout like new grass.
- Gen 5:3Adam lived one hundred thirty years, and became the father of a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.
Themes, concepts, people & topics
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Christ at the center
Job's cry for a mediator who can lay his hand on both God and man, and his confidence that 'my Redeemer lives' and will stand on the earth, reaches forward to Jesus the living Redeemer.
How Job 14:4 points to him is part of the one story that runs through all Scripture — meet Jesus at the heart of the web, or follow a trail that traces him from Genesis to Revelation.
Original language
Each word below is tagged with its Strong’s number — tap one to see the underlying Hebrew word, its meaning, and every verse that uses it.